Parent Volunteer Hours

Joy Campbell
Joy Campbell
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in Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions™ General Discussions

This may have been answered before - but I did a quick search and couldn't find anything. We require our parents to serve a certain number of hours each school year. I'm amazed that with a robust program like BB, there's no way for parents to input those hours, or for us to track those, other than a google sheet or something of that sort, which would then need to be put in manually. I'm hoping I'm wrong, and that I just haven't discovered it yet. Could someone tell me what you do at your school to track hours?

Best Answer

  • Lauren Henderson
    Lauren Henderson Community All-Star
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    Answer ✓

    Hi Joy, I've looked at this from the student volunteer (service) hours angle (and I know there is a pretty robust field of ideas in the Idea Bank pertaining to this) but I haven't worked at a school that required, or formally tracked, parent volunteerism.

    I would recommend a Community Group to be able to organize your parents, especially if there are those who spearhead the volunteerism. There is a Bulletin Board, where you could put a link to a google sheet tracking document if you want people to self-report, and maybe provide some soft peer pressure/encouragement!

Answers

  • Crystal Bruce
    Crystal Bruce admin
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    Hi @Joy Campbell - I am tagging in a few All-Stars who might be able to assist. @Lauren Henderson and @Brian Gray to see if they can offer any insight into this if they or someone in their organization tracks parent hours.

  • Brian Gray
    Brian Gray Community All-Star
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    I've thought about this question, but I don't have any ideas for using anything that native to the LMS for tracking hours for parents. I agree that a Community Group is a good option for posting parent opportunities. Another option for that is a tile on the parents' resource board.

    We track student hours using MobileServe, but I don't know if that would work for parents.

    If I were the person who had to make it work, I would probably use a Google form, and throw some magic formulas at the Responses spreadsheet. (I would make the parent's email address a required field so that I had something easy to use to match multiple entries from the same person.)

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